Some hands-on impressions of Nival's Silent Storm-powered 'Night Watch':Combat, of course, is the focus of Night Watch, and it's here that the game uses many of the gameplay ideas found in Silent Storm, though the turn-based mechanics will also be familiar if you played games such as X-Com or Jagged Alliance. Each character has a limited number of action points to use per turn, and it's up to you to decide how to use them. You can move the character around the battlefield, attack, use a special power or ability, and more, so long as you have enough action points. Needless to say, the more powerful or potent the attack or ability, the more action points it takes to use, so you often have a choice of spending your points on lots of less-powerful attacks or gambling most of your points on a more-powerful attack. While there are guns and other conventional weapons in the game, they're fairly useless, because if you've seen the movie, then you know that bullets aren't much to werewolves and vampires. You'll instead rely on an arsenal of special abilities and attacks, such as knockback (knock an enemy onto his or her rear, which forces them to spend precious action points to get back up) or triple blade (hurl mystical daggers at a target). As you gain experience and level up, you'll be able to unlock more-powerful abilities and attacks. In addition, the more you use a specific power, the higher in level it becomes. |